Two years ago, my wife and I were on our way to Missouri with a screaming infant in the back seat, frantic to find some music that would calm him down.

“We could listen to the Hamilton soundtrack,” she suggested.

I had been dragging my feet for months, trying not to listen to a soundtrack I was sure would ruin a play I eventually wanted to see without having heard it all in advance. But with my ears ringing from a wail that sounded less baby than pterodactyl, I relented. (If you're similarly averse to spoilers, consider yourself warned.)

After the opening staccato march and silky violin riff, the first words that greeted my ears were these:

“How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?”

How indeed.

The rest of the first track detailed how America’s first Treasury secretary and founding father Alexander Hamilton was abandoned by his father, lost his mother to disease, saw his cousin commit suicide and his hometown flattened by a hurricane, and yet managed to not only escape his circumstances, but also become a leader and a hero who left an indelible mark on United States history.

His story is a most convincing portrait, not just of the American dream, but also of the boundless potential of the individual. The entire play, from start to finish, is a poignant discussion of the value of one life and the utter unpredictability of fortune, favor, and fate, as summarized by General Washington in the track “History Has Its Eyes On You.”

“Let me tell you what I wish I’d known when I was young and dreamed of glory,

"You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”

The point is also underscored by Aaron Burr’s bewildered lament in one of the play’s most melodic pieces, "Wait For It."

“Life doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints,

"It takes and it takes and it takes and we keep living anyway,

"We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes,

"And if there’s a reason I’m still alive when so many have died,

"I’m willing to wait for it.”

Alexander’s wife, Eliza, as well as Washington, continually stress their desire for him to simply “stay alive” through the revolution, in order to lead a family and a nation afterward — a plea Eliza also sobs when their son, Phillip, lays expiring after dueling to defend his father’s honor.

And finally, the thread weaves its way to the end, when a regretful Aaron Burr recognizes that the taking of a life is deep enough tragedy to submerge all other accomplishment or notoriety by simply noting, “He may have been the first to die, but I’m the one who paid for it.”

But could this grand story —Hamilton’s story — have played out in America today?

Maybe not, for one simple reason: Like hundreds of thousands of other disadvantaged, low-income, and unplanned children, Alexander Hamilton would have faced a higher risk of being aborted.

Abortion providers tend to target minority-heavy, low-income communities, and frequently sell the notion that children are a limiting factor on the success and independence of their parents.

But there’s another, more sinister defense of the practice I’ve seen crop up in debates lately: namely, the idea that children should be aborted to spare them (presumed) suffering, poverty, or abandonment.

This argument not only evidences a lack of respect for life, but also a dark brand of fatalism that suggest preemptive death is better than temporal pain.

If there was ever a rebuke to that line of thinking, it was the life of one Alexander Hamilton, an illegitimate child born to an impoverished single mother on a godforsaken speck of an island in the 1700s.

His entire life and impact on American history can be traced back to one important choice before all others — his mother’s choice to give him life.

How many Hamiltons are denied their shot today by an industry that victimizes low-income communities and aborts more than 600,000 babies per year?

Hamilton’s writer and cast have been anything but politically passive, calling out Vice President Mike Pence at a showing, and advocating on behalf of liberal causes and organizations nationwide. Generally, their messaging has tended to focus on the importance of equality under the law and opportunity for all Americans, with one tragic and contradictory exception:

Lin Manuel-Miranda himself has been a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood, and his mother serves on the abortion provider’s board. Though he has rationalized support by noting that abortion is “only a small part” of what the organization does (a dubious claim on its own), it’s hard to believe that the creator of the Broadway blockbuster doesn’t see the connection between his play’s main character and an industry that would have denied him breath entirely given half a chance.

But Hamilton opened in Des Moines with a unique political backdrop: the recent passage of Iowa’s fetal heartbeat bill, designed to make sure that preborn children with a heartbeat are protected by law.

And that’s an important step toward protecting the Hamiltons of the world: the poor, the disabled, the unwanted, the unlikely to succeed - the ones that abortion advocates would have you see as worthless clumps of cells.

The truth is that all human beings are clumps of cells, and that little human beings, no matter how disadvantaged, have the potential to change the world in ways we simply cannot foresee.

There’s more work to be done here in Iowa and nationally to end the scourge of legal abortion, but pro-lifers can draw some encouragement from the story of Hamilton, and continue pressing forward despite resistance.

After all, history has its eyes on us.

Joel Kurtinitis(Photo: Special to the Register)

Joel Kurtinitis of Des Moines is a homeschooler, conservative-libertarian writer and millennial political activist, who contributes regular columns to the Register. Follow Joel on Facebook at facebook.com/jkurtinitis or on Twitter @Joel_Kurtinitis.